Trust in AI coding tools is plummeting

14 kiyanwang 8 8/5/2025, 8:21:30 AM leaddev.com ↗

Comments (8)

fardinahsan · 3h ago
Isn't the sample super biased? StackOverflow is increasingly bleeding users to AI tooling. Shouldn't we expect the remaining users to be increasingly distrustful of AI?

I don't use StackOverflow at all anymore.

mutkach · 20m ago
> Respondents were recruited primarily through channels owned by Stack Overflow. The top sources of respondents were onsite messaging, blog posts, email/newsletter subscribers, banner ads, and social media posts. Since respondents were recruited in this way, highly-engaged users on Stack Overflow were more likely to notice the prompts to take the survey over the duration of the collection promotion. We also recruited respondents via a Reddit ad campaign, this accounted for < 2% of total responses.
absoluteunit1 · 1h ago
That’s a good point - but I suspect that many people who don’t use StackOverflow still participate in the survey. It’s quite popular
mutkach · 30m ago
yakattak · 1h ago
As expected we’re getting closer and closer to the Trough of Disillusionment. That’s not a bad thing, because it leads to the Plateau of Productivity.[1]

Anecdotally for myself I’m finding that LLMs are great when I can give it a hyper specific target like a function to write. This isn’t because it can’t write an entire script. It can. It’s because the more I let it run wild, it feels like my understanding of the code gets exponentially worse.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

mutkach · 21m ago
Growing disillusionment among programmers (whose productivity gains, by the way, represent the most successful use case for AI yet) is indeed not necessarily a bad thing.

What is concerning is that VCs seem to believe we are still in the exponential growth phase of the hype cycle. I believe the consensus among them (and the bigtech-adjacent shills) is that they are targeting a trillion-dollar market at minimum. Somehow.

odinellefsen · 2h ago
And they're getting more expensive
hollownobody · 1h ago
"AI tools are bad", says company most suffering by the use of AI tools